Last May, Kathy and I went into the city another weekend to visit a few of her high school friends who, coincidentally, were either living or visiting San Francisco at the time. It turns out they live on a street that looks a little like the one on the right (that one’s taken from the top of the much steeper Nob Hill, but you get the idea).

Even cooler, though, I discovered that the fiance of one of the girls is one of the product managers for Tesla Motors. It wasn’t too hard, since I saw posters of Tesla prototype drawings hanging on the wall the moment we walked in. This was a chance meet-up, both for me because I could proceed to pepper him with questions for the next two hours, and for him because it turns out he had never met an actual customer. (Interestingly, this is a “problem” that engineers at my company have as well: there are so many layers of abstraction between the actual customers and the most technical engineers that they rarely, if ever, get to see each other!)

Anyway, we had a long, interesting conversation. I regaled him with tales of how the Roadster is both great for a v1.0 car and pretty poor in terms of clearly being designed by people who live in a climate that fluctuates between 50 and 80F. (For example, both the air-conditioning and heating are pretty anemic in extreme temperatures. I think it’s because they had to play it really tight on power budget.) But it was a story he told that really sticks in mind now, almost a few months later.

He described a phenomenon he encountered in one of his first “projects.” I’m not sure if that’s the right terminology, but basically he was tasked with going and figuring out how to put a big switch in the car. I think this may be the master switch (a relay, actually) that has to toggle the battery between the charging circuitry, including your wall outlet providing the power source, and the motor, for when you want to go drive. Now, this is no ordinary switch, since it has to be pretty beefy (high current) and reliable (your car depends on it). I’m sure it has all kinds of other esoteric design criteria that I wouldn’t understand even if he’d described them to me.

But what he said that was especially interesting was that, when he really got down to the details and hunted down the suppliers and went calling on them to talk to them about the intricate design parameters for their switches, they couldn’t tell him much of anything about how they designed them. Moreover, they weren’t competent enough in their own understanding of their own products to be able to meaningfully discuss making changes to fit the unique requirements of Tesla. It was as if all the people who actually did the design work for the switch were … gone. The companies were happily selling a wide variety of switches for all types of everyday purposes, but the engineering expertise had left the building. And a long time ago, at that.

If I recall correctly, he went further to describe the arduous process of having to grow the design expertise in-house at Tesla in order to make progress in creating some of the parts that they needed — parts they otherwise were expecting to be able to source from third-party providers with relative ease. He was amazed, at least initially, at how hard it was to find real experts in any of these commoditized component manufacturers. And so it was that I sat around that afternoon with David and lamented the downfall of various “old school” halls of engineering wizardry, most of which were probably in decay or dead before I was even old enough to really understand the phenomenon.

It was just happenstance, then, that I finally got to attend an annual Maker Faire convention the following weekend in San Mateo. Maker Faire is a gathering of geeks, weirdos, and largely-amateur engineers who like to build stuff. Make Magazine has been putting it on for several years now, and I was really looking forward to finally attending one in person instead of reading about stuff in the mag and seeing pictures on the web.

It turns out that its popularity has grown immensely, and we foolishly elected to attend on the busiest afternoon, so there were just gobs of people. Hordes. Tens and tens of thousands. The event is so big that it now kind of naturally attracts a lot of non-”hard engineering” disciplines, so there was the giant human-scale Mouse Trap machine, a lot of hippies with crazy decorated cars (some clearly from Burning Man or inspired by it), a bunch of the steampunk clubs and groups, a guy breathing off a scuba tank floating in a bigger clear plastic bubble shaped like a human, giant cardboard robot guy, and so on. I don’t really mind most of these kinds of people, but the ones that start to float off into the libertarian anarchy do tend to lower the signal-to-noise ratio a bit, unfortunately.

Fortunately, the main hall was filled with legitimate gadget and process vendors showing off a variety of fascinating machines and tools and techniques. There were several of the new plastic 3D printers running and lots of demonstration objects out for playing with. (Cost: $10,000. Size: big microwave. Cost per object: ~$20/cubic inch.) A lot of robotics companies. There was even a whole section on craft and sewing. But by far the largest booth at the show was assigned to SparkFun Electronics, a wildly-popular new hobbyist electronics parts supplier that happens to call its home Boulder, Colorado. Although I don’t have the time nor the mental capacity to work seriously on a project of this sort any time soon, I’ve been following SparkFun since I learned about them a year ago. They really do a particularly special job of bringing parts, along with sample projects, documentation, and user discussion fora, to the masses of amateurs the likes of whom would want to build fun stuff out of electronics.

So it was seeing this booth that reset my fear for the generational downfall of true builders. You see, SparkFun was hosting sessions all throughout the Faire for both novice and experienced electronics builders. If you were pretty well practiced (or just had a big ego), you could sign up for and learn how to do surface-mount circuitry. Or, if you were more of a beginner, they had little kits you could buy and then sit in a giant circle of tables and solder them up, right there on the spot. So there were just dozens of kids sitting around with these high end Weller soldering irons (running 350 or 400F, of course) smoking up the place making stuff. It was great! There were plenty of boys, and then a humorous entourage of worried-looking Moms standing behind them presumably wondering if they were going to burn a few tattoos into their hands. There were also girls, in quantity. Some whole families were sitting there working on projects.

It was inspiring. It was a fact when I was that age that not very many kids had access or the motivation to do this kind of hands-on work. And, I have no doubt that kids today have far more “interesting” things they can spend their time on via the internet, including working only in the software domain. There’s just way more velocity of growth in these areas, to the detriment of people learning how the stuff down the abstraction ladder really works, or at least learning enough of it to not be scared to go learn more if they need to later. But, for this one afternoon, in this one special place, under that one tent, it was possible to see a little bit of “hope” for one part of the future of engineering, hard at work having fun.

I want to be clear that I’m not one of those guys who sits around moping about how the next generation is focusing its energy on the “wrong” stuff. The same abstraction model that will keep 99.999% of today’s kids from dabbling in assembly language, or wire-wrapping up a computer from IC gates, or building a radio from simple linear circuits … also lets my Mom write an email and send it around the world without having to understand the things that make that happen underneath. I get it, this progress is good. But, to be a world-class engineer, one needs experience and wisdom gained from understanding many different tiers amongst the ever-expanding library of design that us humans have stacked together. Finding ways to make gaining that experience fun, joyous, and exploratory for young minds is really critical… so David can keep making his Teslas, so I can keep posting these scintillating blog entries, and so all of us can keep the world a-spinning.